Apple’s revenue and net profit up year-on-year, but it only sold 26 million iPhones in Q2

It’s that time of the year again, ladies and gentlemen. The earnings season. Apple has reported its results for the second quarter of this year (April-June), and there’s some good news and some not so good news.

Let’s start with the good. Apple managed to sell an impressive 17 million iPads during this period. Revenue was at a healthy $35 billion, and profit came in at $8.8 billion. The company sold 26 million iPhones.

Which is 26% less than in the first quarter, yet still 28% more than in Q2 2011. So Apple’s still growing year-on-year, although at a slower pace than over the past couple of quarters. The drop in sales compared to Q1 was widely expected, and it’s part of Apple’s rather unique sales pattern. Because it launches new devices in the second half of the year, the second quarter usually is its worst in terms of phone sales in each year.

That said, many analysts were expecting the iPhone sales number to be closer to 30 million. At 26 million, we might have an interesting situation. If Samsung manages to sell 52 million smartphones (and it’s widely projected to go past 50 million, so that could be possible), it would have managed to double Apple’s number. That would certainly be a great feat for the Korean company.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. A new iPhone is clearly on the way and will launch either in late Q3 or Q4. That’s when Apple’s sales numbers may skyrocket once more, just like they did in the last quarter of 2011.

Until then, one can’t positively say whether these Q2 2012 results are the start of a negative(-ish) trend for Apple. And remember, they’re still up YoY.

In Q2 2011, Apple posted revenue of $28.6 billion, and a net profit of $7.3 billion. The company’s gross margin increased to 42.8% this year compared to 41.7% in the year-ago quarter. International sales are becoming more and more important for Apple, as it made 62% of its money outside of the US in this quarter.

Some other interesting stats were revealed during the conference call. Total iOS device sales are now up to 410 million, 45 million of those being sold this quarter. So by simple math, that means that Apple’s sold 2 million iPod touch devices in Q2 2012.

The iTunes App Store now holds 650,000 apps, more than 200,000 of those being optimized for the iPad. iCloud now has 150 million users, and the iPhone is available on 250 carriers in more than 100 countries.